A Tudor feast

Sargeant’s Mess (2018) is a tourist catcher’s net in restaurant form by the Tower of London (c. 1078). It has views of the wide, fat Thames — an old man now, like Falstaff — on its slow journey to Southend-on-Sea. The City of London grows like a glass parasite, but it can’t do anything about the Conqueror’s keep. It is partly made of Norman stone — a joke for historians only? — and it won’t be gentrified, amended, or moved.

The Tower squats inside those insanely over-repointed medieval walls like a dowager abutting a conservatory. It will never, and I say this happily, be a block of flats, or an Apple shop, or a Starbucks. Henry VIII added the cupolas, and they are very gay, but that was it.

I love this fortress, even if it has moved from decapitating pretenders to selling pencils. It looks weird next to the A100, and that is not the least of it; I once met a Beefeater who looked like Paddington Bear but had guarded Rudolf Hess in Spandau prison.

I love Traitors’ Gate because Elizabeth I, the early ‘modern Lord Mandelson, used it for the art of spin. When imprisoned by her sister Mary she refused to enter by Traitors’ Gate, because, she said, she was not a traitor. She waited until she knew her denial would be repeated, which is why I know about it, and also you. Except David Starkey says it’s nonsense, and she entered by Tower Wharf. Tudor PR babble is superb.

Just along from Traitors’ Gate is Sargeant’s Mess. It calls itself, in PR babble, ‘your new favourite hangout’ and it is not as interesting as Traitors’ Gate although, in Sargeant’s Mess’s defence, Traitors’ Gate doesn’t serve a full vegetarian breakfast.